While browsing through a bookstore this weekend, I happened to be flipping through an issue of Comics Journal which contained an extremely unfavorable review of Scott McCloud’s book, Reinventing Comics. I thought McCloud’s second book was disappointing as well, and some of the reviewers points were valid, but one of them floored me as being so wrong that I find it hard to believe someone was actually making the argument. In a nutshell, the reviewer argued that McCloud’s hope for independent web sites is doomed by the looming cloud of corporate capitalism.
The argument goes something like this: as the number of web sites proliferate the ability of people to find any given web site is declining. Major search engines, after all, only index X percent (fill in any random number you want there, since most such figures are conjectures based on conjectures based on outright guesses). Meanwhile, large corporations are prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting their own sites. Bottom line: unless you’re already a brand name — like Stephen King — forget about it. Game over.
From where I sit, this is almost a complete mirror image of reality. One of the main problems with the sort of left wing critique of capitalism that the reviewer was offering is that they almost always vastly overestimate the power of corporations. As an example of how corporations would rule the Internet, for example, he pointed out that several publishing companies were supposedly spending $100 million to promote just six e-books on the Gemstar ebook platform. If true, here’s what those publishing companies will get for their efforts — a wasted $100 million. The Gemstar product is crap that makes a key error in a mass market consumer device of providing the features that fulfill corporate needs rather than consumer needs. The only way Gemstar and publishers using that system are going to get widespread adoption is to spend $100 billion and give everyone in the United States one of the readers for free.
But, I digress. Large, expensive content providers are failing left and right. Salon.Com is on its last legs. Slate is essentially an expensive trophy piece (and an unimpressive one at that) for Microsoft. Meanwhile there are literally hundreds of smaller, independent content sites that are thriving and turning a profit. They are not necessarily making the sort of profits that Random House makes off of a bestselling novel, but they are making enough money to pay the bills and provide a modest living to those running the sites.
From personal experience, the incessant claims about the declining uselessness of search engines are nonsense. For the first three months of 2001, my web server received about 600,000 requests for pages, from about 80,000 or so unique visitors. Since I have been busy with adding and organizing content, I have done essentially no promotion beyond search engine submissions. Frankly I’m impressed with how quickly and thoroughly search engines update their content. I was a bit surprised, for example, doing a search on the Pockey hard drive on Google.Com to see that a brief article I had written on the product a couple months ago showed up on the list of search results.
And 200,000 page views/month really represents a relatively low end of what is possible. When I start doing some earnest promotions of the site beginning in the Fall. Now 200,000 page views is probably a half a day’s worth for something like Salon.Com, but I haven’t burned through millions of dollars worth of venture capital. In fact, the cost of doing all this (aside from personal) time has been so cheap that it’s essentially been free. In the last 12 months, for example, I’ve probably spent $5,000 on web-site related expenses.
Okay, my wife corrects me that five grand isn’t really “nothing” but it is nothing compared to traditional publishing costs.